50 ways to take notes

Solution Watch compiled an incredibly convenient collection of websites to assist you in your random acts of note-taking and list making throughout your day.

WebCT Drop Lowest

This was a nice little find in the Dr. C WebCT help boards. It's simple and effective. If you ever need to drop your lowest test score in your WebCT grade book (version 4.1) this formula might help. To use this, all your tests would need to be out of the same number of points or be calculated percentages. First add a calculated column to your gradebook. Then edit the formula for that column. You will want to add up all your tests with the SUM method, and then using the MIN method, find the lowest score of those same tests and subtract it. The formula for 5 tests would look like this:

SUM{[test1],[test2],[test3],[test4],[test5]} - MIN{[test1],[test2],[test3],[test4],[test5]}

audio component

I helped build this audio glossary spelling tutorial component for a new online pharmacology course. I think everyone was happy with the results. The students click on the vocab items to hear the pronunciation. With the spelling hidden, only ****s show. I wish I could post the entire component here, but with all the audio files, it's just not practical.

web 2.0

TechCrunch put together a nice 24 minute documentary/interview video Q&A-ing many Web 2.0 industry leaders. And I use the word "industry" loosely.

social brain

Here is a quote from the recent 10 question interview with Arthur Chickering from iStream. Kirkwood subscribes to iStream, so any Kirkwood employee can read the whole interview once you register on the site. Many good articles to read. I chose this quote mostly as a reminder to myself. I need to exercise my social brain.

What do you mean by the phrase, “Learning is a whole-person, whole-brain activity?”

Here is what brain researchers have found: Body, mind, and brain exist in a dynamic unity; our brain is a social brain; the search for meaning is innate; the brain establishes meaning through patterning; emotions are critical to patterning; learning involves conscious and unconscious processes; complex learning is enhanced by challenge, inhibited by threat; and every brain is uniquely organized withresulting differences in talents and preferences.

iStream Portal

multiple communities

Community building is stressed often as an important element to distance learning. The social aspect of education is powerful if not necessary. I was reminded recently of my own difficulties in individualized French instruction in large part due to the missing error correction that inevitably happens when learning in groups. Later, when I took classroom French courses, I was part of the error producing group. There was comfort and relief in that I no longer had to make all the mistakes myself. But I was also part of the grad-student-in-undergrad-course community. And I was part of the sit-towards-back-right-of-room community (oh, the jokes made at the expense of the lef-side-of-room were many). And I was part of the prepared-for-class community. And so on. The point is, if I may be so bold as to have a point, there isn't just one community to build. And by building, I mean, allowing to exist.

Sir Ken Robinson

This is a speech by Sir Ken Robinson. It speaks to many reasons why I question the trend I see in many distance learning program's design team structure. While I do believe a designers input and involvement is important, I think the creativity of instructors will be hampered by templated and ultra-uniform design.

Course Evals - Article

A new edition of Innovate is out. The article quoted below is timely since we will be piloting a student evaluation in the Fall. Many of their findings certainly ring true with my own experience. I had no say in my course eval procedures and felt like it was just another administrative hoop I needed to leap through. That attitude most certainly tranferred to my students and likely explains how they completed the surveys so quickly (with no reflection or thought at all). While some students did take the surveys seriously, they were usually the ones who had something to gripe about. Little insight could be gleaned from such feedback other than personality differences.

Moving student evaluations online inherits challenges unrelated to technology and the Internet; instead, as is often the case, it is the migration online that puts an old issue under a new light. There remains a persistent lack of evidence that student evaluation instruments evince strategies for improvement, ostensibly their principle purpose. In fact, evidence suggests that most student course evaluation instruments may even impede improvement (Birnbaum 2000). The lack of a shared understanding of the purpose of evaluation among students, faculty, and administration underlies this concern.

Innovate - Online Student Evaluations and Response Rates Reconsidered

RSS feed in WebCT

Say you have a blog, like this one, or some other RSS feed that you would like to incorporate into your WebCT course. Sounds like a good idea to me. Or maybe you maintain a list of public bookmarks on a site like FURL or del.icio.us both which have RSS subscription possibilities. If you are not sure what RSS is, not to worry. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. An RSS feed is made up of code (XML) that a user can subscribe to and is then pushed out to other places you might be more inclined to visit like your google homepage or news aggregator or even a WebCT page.

The site that makes this so easy to do in WebCT is feed2js.org. This site will generate all the code necessary to build a simple RSS aggregator for yourself or your students. All you need to know is the URL for the RSS feed. This is usually a little button somewhere that says RSS or XML or ATOM. If you click on that, your screen typically doesn't look too pretty, but your address bar will contain the URL that you need. Select it and copy it. The feed for this blog is http://abbreviated.blogspot.com/atom.xml.

Then you visit Feed2js.org and click on the Build tab. Paste in the URL, make your selections, preview your feed and finally click the Generate JavaScript button. Select this script and copy it.

Then inside WebCT, create a new HTML file and paste in the script. Save it and take a look at your handiwork. Now, everytime that blog or RSS feed has something new added to it, your page will change automagically. If I update my blog, my feed page is updated as well. A great way to incorporate blogs reading into your WebCT course.

Thanks to Jason Vetter for showing this at the WebCT User Conference!

cueFlash

This is a simple little tool that has wide application potential. Create your own deck of Flashcards for any subject and share your deck with others.

I have created a deck for Online Learning jargon and terms (you will need to create a login to actually use the deck). Feel free to share it with your learners by passing them the link. And feel free to add to the deck if there are items missing!